PeopleBrowsr Launches API for Influencer Targeting

Social media monitoring firm PeopleBrowsr is announcing a new API today that combines PeopleBrowsr and Kred services to help companies not only look at who’s talking about them on social networks, but also drill down and find key influencers using a variety of criteria for a more granular picture of the discussions going on around their products and services. It’s a move that should help PeopleBrowsr remain competitive with other social media analytics platforms and providers like Gnip and DataSift, and could also give Klout competitor Kred a little more traction, by at least getting its scores out in front of more people.

The new PeopleBrowsr-Kred API takes advantage of PeopleBrowsr’s full firehose access to Twitter, something that’s been in place since 2008, as well as public Facebook and blog posts to let companies search for people based on a number of criteria, including sex, gender and Kred metrics like reach and influence. It’ll help marketers and brands find, for instance, all the women who’ve tweeted about a particular product launch in a given time period, making it possible to see how campaigns have worked with very specific markets.

PeopleBrowsr Director of API Strategy Travis Wallis told BetaKit in an interview that this level of specificity can help companies better handle situations like botched online social media campaigns and digital crises, in addition to helping them run successful campaigns. “Crisis management is a huge area, there’s also marketing in general, and CRM-type stuff,” he said. For instance, it can help companies zero in on engaging with the top 15 people (as measured by influence) who are talking about their brand on a given day.

Companies are already using PeopleBrowsr’s API in interesting ways, Wallis told us. For instance, Visual.ly’s recently introduced Create tool, which makes it possible for anyone to leverage social connections to create their own infographic, takes most of its Twitter data from PeopleBrowsr’s API services. Likewise, Mashable’s mRank tool is built with PeopleBrowsr.

There are a fair number of services out there that PeopleBrowsr competes with in at least some regard, including DataSift, Gnip, PeerIndex and Klout, Wallis told us that he believes PeopleBrowsr offers something the others don’t in every area where their offerings overlap. “For every single competitor we may have, we have a unique proposition,” he said. “So for DataSift, for example, what we can do is provide minute-by-minute analytics, we can provide a way for you to identify people by a 50-keyword long query.”

Of course, PeopleBrowsr’s competition would likely make similar claims to having unique features, but this latest API upgrade does seem to be offering some of the key targeting tools that a lot of businesses are looking for when it comes to the nebulous world of online influence. And since this space is likely to only become more active as brands continue to realize that controlling reputation online is a key ingredient to success with today’s consumers, it’s likely there’s plenty of market opportunity to go around for the time being.